The Florida Legislature, with unanimous bipartisan support, in the early 1990s recognized the compelling need to reduce infant mortality and promote healthy childhood development by creating the Florida Healthy Start program.

Investing in the health of our at-risk mothers and newborns is a true Florida success story that deserves to be celebrated.

Unfortunately, Healthy Start is being targeted in the Florida Senate proposed budget with a potentially devastating $19-million reduction. If enacted, this approximately 30-percent cut is one that may never heal, resulting in an unprecedented withholding of essential preventive health care for pregnant women and their babies

Healthy Start services help prevent maternal and infant health problems that can not only be emotionally devastating, but enormously costly. Since the development of our statewide services network, Healthy Start has contributed to a 35-percent reduction in infant mortality.

The health of babies is often used as an important indicator to measure the well-being of a community, and Florida currently leads southern states in the reduction of infant mortality rates.

We have made these strides forward by launching universal risk screening for pregnant women and infants, a hallmark program of Healthy Start services that is credited with an increase in positive birth outcomes and early entry into prenatal care. Florida is the only state with this valuable comprehensive system.

At the community level, Healthy Start conjoins the professional talents of physicians, nurses, and birth educators with the active involvement of the business, faith and civic service leaders who understand that the well-being of our children starts, quite literally, with the health of our babies.

In order to continue on this positive path of success, continued funding of quality services is essential. Because of the annual birth of some 210,000 newborns in our state, our work is essential and far from complete.

We are developing a new care delivery structure that will reach into each community to increase our impact on helping Florida’s highest-risk mothers and infants. In partnership with the Department of Health and Agency for Health Care Administration, under the office of Gov. Rick Scott, this model will have an even greater impact on infant mortality, prematurity and healthy child development by providing:

If Healthy Start is not funded at its current budget levels, essential services for high-risk women and babies will suffer. We can ill-afford to turn back and lose 25 years of momentum in supporting healthy pregnancies, improving the status of babies and reducing infant mortality and morbidity.